Cheney's Role In 911 Put On
Center Stage By British MP
By Mark Burdman
Executive Intelligence Review.
9-19-3

For the first time, a prominent British political figure
has aired his suspicions, that the group around U.S. Vice President Dick
Cheney may have intentionally caused, or allowed to happen, the mega-terrorism
in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, to set into motion an era
of neo-imperial wars. Labour Party Member of Parliament Michael Meacher
wrote a major feature focussing on Cheney's Project for a New American
Century grouping, in the London Guardian on Sept. 6. Meacher had resigned
in June as Environment Minister, a post he held in Tony Blair's government
for six years. This Summer's political wars in Britain, as EIR forecast
they would, are drawing ever closer to Cheney. This is the context in which
Meacher took Blair to task for subordinating Britain's interests to Cheney
and his neo-conservative gang in Washington.

Ever since Lyndon LaRouche first affirmed, early in the
morning of 9/11, that the attacks were an "inside job," it has
been taboo in Britain to publicly discuss this possibility, especially
as Blair's Britain joined in the neo-conservatives' wars against Afghanistan
and Iraq, becoming the Cheney-acs' main prop overseas. And although Meacher's
polemic narrows the motive of Cheney et al. to an oil grab, his intervention
is timely.

On Sept. 7, just ahead of the second anniversary of 9/11,
London was the scene of huge "anti-terror exercises," including
contingency plans for the mass evacuation of the city. During that week,
there was heavy police presence and Londoners were very nervous. One European
strategist warned EIR Sept. 9, that London is the most likely target for
a new act of mega-terrorism. But a London insider cautioned EIR, on the
same day, that Blair and his minions are determined to stoke alarm, to
"justify" his war policies and to divert attention from his political
woes.

Those woes are bound to get worse. The Lord Hutton inquiry
into the July 17 death of weapons expert Dr. David Kelly had produced startling
revelations by Sept. 8, blowing apart the case Blair made last year for
war against Iraq. One informed source affirmed Sept. 8: "This is only
the beginning, and when the inquiry resumes next Monday [Sept. 15], things
are going to get a lot tougher, when the process of cross-examining leading
officials begins."

Other Labourites are joining the attack on Blair, including
former International Development Secretary Clare Short, and former Leader
of the House of Commons and former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. On Sept.
8, Cook drew gasps from MPs, when he blasted Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon
for having ignored the reservations of his own Defense Intelligence Staff
(DIS), about the fraudulent September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) issued by Blair's 10 Downing Street. Hoon was then
jeered, when he tried to pass off responsibility for the dossier to Britain's
Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The next day, it was revealed that
Hoon had given misleading evidence to the House of Commons Intelligence
and Security Committee investigating the dossier in July, flatly denying
that DIS experts had expressed such concerns. It is widely assumed that
Hoon will soon bite the dust, closely following the Aug. 29 resignation
of Downing Street chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell.

On Sept. 8, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw came into the
Hutton inquiry fire, as documents were released, showing his role in bringing
Kelly's name into the public light, as the source for a BBC report that
intelligence experts had regarded the September 2002 dossier as "sexed
up." Kelly's death followed shortly after his name was made public.
It also came out that Hoon had played a role in "sexing up" that
dossier, urging that references to Iraqi WMDs be strengthened and demanding
a "killer paragraph" to make the case against Iraq stronger.

A U.K. intelligence expert told EIR Sept. 8, that these
eruptions are creating a fertile environment, in which the issues Meacher
has raised can now be "openly debated and considered.... The Hutton
inquiry, and other factors, have raised enormous questions about why Tony
Blair, in reality, wanted this Iraqi weapons dossier, and that, in turn,
is focussing attention on the motives of the administration in Washington,
in starting the war in Iraq."

This bad news for Blair in Britain bodes ill for Cheney
and Co., and all sorts of surprises may emerge. How nervous certain people
are, is becoming clear from the wild attacks on Meacher's article: by the
American Embassy in London; by Lord Conrad Black's Sunday Telegraph; and
by Rupert Murdoch's Times.

'The Truth May Be a Great Deal Murkier'

Meacher's Guardian article was entitled, "This War
on Terrorism Is Bogus," with the sub-title, "The 9/11 attacks
gave the U.S. an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination."

He began, that whereas "massive attention"
has been paid to Britain's excuse for going to war, "far too little
attention has focused on why the U.S. went to war; and that throws light
on British motives too.

"The conventional explanation is that after the
Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan
was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then,
because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the U.S. and U.K. governments to
retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as
well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be
a great deal murkier."

He went on: "We now know that a blueprint for the
creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now Vice
President), Donald Rumsfeld (Defense Secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's
deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's
chief of staff). The document, entitled 'Rebuilding America's Defenses,'
was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank, Project
for the New American Century (PNAC).

"The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take
military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in
power. It says 'while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the
Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.' "

Meacher noted that the PNAC blueprint supported an earlier
document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the United States
must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our
leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
This early-1990s "Pentagon Guidance Document," a.k.a. "the
Wolfowitz doctrine," prescribes pre-emptive military action, and implicitly,
pre-emptive nuclear strikes, against potential challenges to an American
or Anglo-American empire.

Cheney, then Defense Secretary in President H.W. Bush's
Administration, supported this outrage, which was nixed then by senior
Administration figures, including the President. With Bush Jr., the policy
has been implemented.

In detailing the September 2000 PNAC blueprint, Meacher
noted that it refers to allies such as the U.K., as "the most effective
and efficient means of exercising American global leadership." Further,
the blueprint also calls for "regime change" in China, and advocates
imperial control of space and cyberspace, and development of new biological
weapons. "FinallyÑwritten a year before 9/11Ñit pinpoints
North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence
justifies the creation of a 'worldwide command and control system.' This
is a blueprint for U.S. world domination. But before it is dismissed as
an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better
explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than
the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways."

Why Did U.S. Air Security Stand Down?

Meacher next presented his views, of what happened two
years ago; EIR finds them worth reporting, including his attributed sources:

"First, it is clear the U.S. authorities did little
or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11
countries provided advance warning to the U.S. of the 9/11 attacks. Two
senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the
CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation
(Daily Telegraph, Sept. 16, 2001). The list they provided included the
names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

"It had been known as early as 1996 that there were
plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a U.S. national
intelligence council report noted that 'al-Qaeda suicide bombers could
crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the
headquarters of the CIA, or the White House.'

"Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas
in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa
bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly
issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing
them to the U.S. for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration
with bin Laden (BBC, Nov. 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after
the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the
hijackers received training at secure U.S. military installations in the
1990s (Newsweek, Sept. 15, 2001).

"Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed
up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be
the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported
he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners.
When U.S. agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist
ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues
to the Sept. 11 mission (Times, Nov. 3, 2001). But they were turned down
by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might
be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20, 2002).

"All of this makes it all the more astonishingÑon
the war on terrorism perspectiveÑthat there was such slow reaction
on Sept. 11 itself.

"The first hijacking was suspected at not later
than 8:20 a.m., and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania
at 10:06 a.m. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from
the U.S. Andrews Air Force Base, just 10 miles from Washington, D.C., until
after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m. Why not? ... Between
September 2000 and June 2001 the U.S. military launched fighter aircraft
on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, Aug. 13, 2002). It is
a U.S. legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly
off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

"Was this inaction simply the result of key people
disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could U.S. air security
operations have been deliberately stood down on Sept. 11? If so, why, and
on whose authority?"

Meacher affirmed that "the catalogue of evidence
does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From
this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely
as bogus cover for achieving wider U.S. strategic geopolitical objectives.
Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison
committee: 'To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got
the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan
but for what happened on Sept. 11" (Times, July 17, 2002). Similarly
Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq
that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking
Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time magazine,
May 13, 2002).

"In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext
to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that
plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well
before 9/11. A report prepared for the U.S. government from the Baker Institute
of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that 'the U.S. remains a prisoner
of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to ... the
flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East.' Submitted to
Vice President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that
because this was an unacceptable risk to the U.S., 'military intervention'
was necessary (Sunday Herald, Oct. 6, 2002)."

Errors of Judgment

Meacher reported that "the PNAC blueprint of September
2000 states that the process of transforming the U.S. into 'tomorrow's
dominant force' is likely to be a long one in the absence of 'some catastrophic
and catalyzing eventÑlike a new Pearl Harbor.' " He concluded
with the charge that "the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks
of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agendaÑthe
U.S. goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force, command over
the oil supplies required to drive the whole project."

Important as is the publication of this charge, from
Tony Blair's own party in Parliament, to narrow the "Cheney project"
to a physiocratic grab for scarce energy supplies fails to grasp the "nature
of the beast."

Cheney's neo-conservative faction is the modern-day embodiment
of the fascist-synarchist forces, that threatened both the Britain and
the United States in the 1940s. Pulling his strings are powerful financier
forcesÑdescendants of those private banking families and financial
interests who brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, and supported Mussolini's
dictatorship in Italy. Their aim now, as then, is to establish a world
empire that would salvage a crisis-ridden financial system, and eliminate
the American humanist-republican tradition associated with Benjamin Franklin,
Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt.

LaRouche has demonstrated that 9/11 was a "Reichstag
Fire," allowing for dictatorial measures at home, and for Samuel P.
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations pitting Western nations against Islam,
and potentially China.

The game is much more dangerous than Meacher has described
it. But with publication of his article, the "Reichstag Fire"
issueÑand crucially, that of the relation between the Cheney's gang's
desires and Tony Blair's actions as British Prime MinisterÑis out
in the open.